Operation Valuable Fiend

by Albert Lulushi

  Iliaz Kraja’s double agent effort throughout 1954 had yielded 63 counterintelligence reports on Sigurimi activities in Rome. Skënder Konica, Aleko Shyti, and Jonuz Mersini, Sigurimi’s legal residents in Italy working under the cover of the Albanian legation, had approached Vërlaci, leader of the BKI, and other Albanian refugees with offers to cooperate or to repatriate to Albania. Various techniques they used against targets included pressure on family members in Albania, appeal to their patriotism, instilling confidence in the Sigurimi’s abilities as evidenced by its success against the Apple team, and meager payments offered to those in dire need. The contacts confirmed that the Sigurimi was consumed with the idea that agents were being recruited and trained at the Albanian company in Germany and continued to pump Kraja for information on agent operations in Albania. They also provided indications that the Sigurimi had a number of informants in the NCFA complex, possibly including Gaqo Gogo, Ibrahim Kodra, Kadri Myftiu, and Rrapo Bineri.22 But at the beginning of 1955, the trail went cold. The CIA had decided to take more control of the exchange and attempt to defect Mersini. Mersini most certainly reported the approach to his bosses in Tirana, who decided to fold the entire operation. At the end of 1955, Mersini reappeared in New York, having been sent there by the Sigurimi as a legal resident, with cover as an adviser to the newly opened Albanian mission at the UN.

  Around the same time, the last character of note appeared on the list of CIA-controlled Albanian assets. It was Xhafer Deva, a fervently anti-Slav Albanian leader from Kosovo, who embraced the dream of Ethnic Albania offered by the Italians and Germans during World War II and threw in his lot with them in open collaboration. Deva served as minister of interior for a short period during the German occupation, when he gained notoriety for allowing the February 4, 1944, massacre in Tirana of eighty-four civilians suspected of being Communist sympathizers. Deva fled with the German troops in 1944 and lived in Vienna, Turkey, and Egypt until 1948, when he moved to Italy. Deva was on intimate terms with Italian intelligence personnel and collaborated with them in recruiting Kosovars who were later parachuted into Albania under Project Lawbook, another US-Italian joint venture cosponsored by the CIA. Under the cryptonym DECADAL, Deva’s CIA assignment in 1955 was to report on Albanian émigré matters as well as on his dealings with the Italian intelligence services. In the past, Deva had been reluctant to accept compensation for what he considered “advisory services” in order to avoid being under any obligation to his benefactors. His CIA contact convinced him to accept $80 per month to cover the rental of his apartment in Rome, which the control officer insisted was necessary for debriefings.23

  * * *

  By 1956 the National Committee for Free Albania had outlived its usefulness and no longer served the purposes for which the Americans had created it in 1949. The geopolitical situation had changed as well. Nikita Khrushchev, the new leader of the Soviet Union, was signaling a desire to improve relations with the West. At the twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he delivered a secret speech, leaked almost immediately to Western media, denouncing the purges and atrocities of Stalin. The other theses advanced at the Congress—“peaceful coexistence” between Communist and capitalist countries—marked the beginning of a thaw in the Soviet relations with the United States.

  On April 28, 1956, the CIA representative in Rome requested a meeting with all the members of the executive committee of the NCFA24 where he read a statement that included the following:

  It is with deep regret that I must announce that the American backers are obliged to withdraw from active sponsorship of the NCFA, effective immediately. However, since the backers realize that they have a moral obligation to honor their financial commitment to the NCFA, contained in the current budget in the hands of the Committee, the final checks to be mailed from New York upon return of Mr. Dosti will include payments due the Committee through the month of June 1956. With these payments, the funds committed to the current NCFA budget will be completely exhausted and financial support by the backers terminated.

  Termination of active support and the existing relationship with the NCFA by the backers had been found necessary for budgetary reasons and because of the relative ineffectiveness for political purposes of the existing agreement.

  I wish to reemphasize that the backers’ termination of the existing relationship with the NCFA does not mean that the Americans are abandoning Albanians. It is only the backers who now are obliged to curtail their activities. The American government and private organizations . . . will continue to render moral and other support wherever possible to Albanians everywhere and in the fight against Communism. . . .

  Finally, the backers have instructed me to speak with each member of the Executive Committee and staff present to extend, on behalf of the backers, their personal and warm appreciation for the cooperation rendered by one and all during the many years of collaboration. The backers, gentlemen, will never forget the sacrifices made by the leaders and loyal followers of the Committee for the welfare of the Albanian people and in the fight against Communism.25

  A short informal discussion followed the reading of the statement, in which the CIA representative recognized the agency’s obligation to the NCFA agents stranded in Yugoslavia when and if they came out. He asked Dosti to prepare as soon as possible the list of commitments beyond that fiscal year and problems, including emergency hardship cases. Then, he had brief private meetings with each of the members where he thanked them personally on behalf of the backers.

  The reaction of the NCFA members was confined largely to expressing concerns about their personal status and pleas for aid in expediting resettlement. The members had expected that the Americans would make changes given the ineffectiveness of their work, but most were shocked at the drastic nature of the action. Some NCFA leaders expressed concern that the opposition would exploit the American withdrawal for their own propaganda benefits.26

  * * *

  One of the last agreements negotiated between the CIA and NCFA covered the compensation of five surviving agents from the very first infiltration team sent to Albania in November 1950, who were stranded in Yugoslavia. Halil Nerguti, who had been able to get out of Yugoslavia in 1955, had received a lump sum settlement of $1,750. The NCFA took the position that this sum was the minimum acceptable for the remainder of the agents (Adem Gjurra, Rexh Berisha, Myftar Maloku, Ramadan Cenaj, and Sali Dalliu).

  However, the CIA case officer handling the negotiation argued that it was quite possible that the other agents might not receive as large a settlement as Nerguti, because it was not clear whether they were truly stranded or had defected to Yugoslavia. In the case of Rexh Berisha and Myftar Maloku, the CIA had received reports that Yugoslavia had bestowed all the privileges and rights of Yugoslav citizens on them and that they were residing with friends or relatives there.

  As its starting point in the negotiations, the CIA offered a one-time payment of $500 to each of the five agents involved, but kept open the option to determine the sum of each settlement on the merit of each individual, provided that “a thorough debriefing is conducted for the purpose among other things to ascertain if (a) subjects performed their mission and remained loyal to HTNEIGH [NCFA]; and (b) there was any willingness on their part to remain in Yugoslavia as long as they have.”27

  The final agreement on the matter reached at the end of June 1956 was the last transaction between the NCFA and the CIA. The NCFA ceased to exist officially on June 28, 1956, when their New York office was closed permanently and all contacts with the CIA were terminated.28

  There is evidence that the CIA honored its side of the agreement to get the money to its agents even when it took many years to find them. A ninety-one-year-old Rexh Berisha, perhaps the last surviving agent covered by the June 1956 agreement, surfaced in 2004 in Kosovo. In an interview he gave to Albanian newspapers, he told of a visit he had received from two Kosovar leaders, Hashim Thaçi and Agim Çeku, accompanied by seven Americans representi
ng the CIA. Berisha said the Americans had given him a medal and $35,000—his back pay for the time he had spent in service of the CIA. It had been enough, Berisha said at the time, to help him rebuild the house that had been burned down by the Serb paramilitary forces as they swept through Kosovo in 1999.29

  * * *

  Once the CIA severed the link with the NCFA, it eliminated the remaining operational threads one by one. The NCFA newspaper Shqipëria ceased publication in 1956. The clandestine radio, Voice of Free Albania, went off the air in 1957. It was replaced for a short period of time by a much smaller broadcasting facility, Radio Socialist Albania, which directed its content against mid-level Communist officials. After 1954, infiltration activities had been reduced to only a couple of incursions a year, in which one or two agents ventured no more than a few miles into Albania and exfiltrated overnight. These missions were completely terminated effective January 31, 1958.30

  The last remnant of the projects that had been started under Fiend, code name OBTUSE, continued into 1959 and consisted of mailing anti-Communist newspapers and revisionist letters to select Albanian government and Communist officials. Because there was no evidence that the mail was getting past the Albanian censorship, and in view of the low priority that Albania presented as a target, the Eastern European Division moved to terminate the project effective December 31, 1959. In the routing sheet that accompanied the request, the approving officer wrote: “Delighted to terminate.”31

  CHAPTER 18

  Lessons and Legacy of Project Fiend

  Project Fiend was the first paramilitary operation planned and executed by the CIA in its early days. As such, it left an imprint on the planning and execution of other Cold War paramilitary actions that followed, including CIA’s coups in Iran and Guatemala, and the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. A number of procedures, methods, and techniques first introduced in this operation would become standard issue for covert operations by the agency in the ensuing years. CIA officers who participated in the operation took with them the experience and lessons learned, both good and bad, as they moved on to other projects.

  For example, the radio communication issues experienced by the first teams infiltrated in 1949 to 1950 showed that radio-telephones operating on VHF frequencies, which relied on ground-to-ground or ground-to-air radio exchanges, were not suitable for the operational tempo of paramilitary forces. The agents were always on the move across rugged terrain and often hiding in caves and forests, with limited access to exposed areas for clear communication. Such requirements led to the development of the RS-1 radio sets, which were introduced in the field in 1950 with the first Albanian team using an RS-1 radio in May 1951. The RS-1 spy set became a staple of CIA operations throughout the 1950s and well into the 1960s. The Albanian infiltration teams were also among the first paramilitary CIA teams to test and use advanced spycraft techniques, such as invisible ink and the coding and decoding of messages using one-time pad keys.

  The agency used the experience of the Apple team in 1952 to 1953 to draw a number of lessons that would enhance the chances of success for future operations and increase the survival rate of its agents. On November 17, 1952, Yatsevitch, while facing the dilemma of Premçi’s broken arm, had suggested that a regular procedure be established to make periodic tape recordings of both the right- and left-hand sending patterns of all W/T operators. Such recordings could then be used to determine whether a set was being operated by the correct person, if doubts arose.1

  On April 20, 1954, the CIA Office of Training requested the permission of the Southeast European Division to use the case of the Apple team as a training exercise in their counterespionage courses.2 On May 18, 1954, a counterespionage review of the proceedings of the trial of Apple agents in Tirana recommended a study of the trial to determine the extent of psychological preconditioning of the defendants by hypnosis, brainwashing, drugs, or other means. The testimonies of Zenel Shehi and Hamit Matiani were especially interesting in this respect, because the men had obviously been rehearsed. Zenel Shehi at times was an exceptionally reluctant witness, responding initially with “I beg your pardon” to queries that may have been particularly repugnant, in order to gain time and allow himself to compose an answer.3

  * * *

  However, what makes Project Fiend impressive from today’s perspective is not necessarily what the agency learned from it but what it failed to learn: the opportunities missed to pause, reflect on successes and failures both, and adjust the course of future plans and operations based on the experience gained.

  As early as August 1949, only a few weeks after BGFIEND had been officially launched, a CIA officer concerned with the progress of events wrote: “I am very strongly of the opinion that the lessons which are daily being borne in upon us by the development of this Project are to a considerable extent being neglected in favor of rapidly growing vested interests, and that as a result we stand a very good chance of being faced with a failure the nature and causes of which will be confused in an exchange of recriminations.”4 It was a warning that was not heeded and a premonition that proved true in a number of cases.

  First, the experience of the Apple team is perhaps the earliest example in the history of US intelligence of asymmetrical warfare as the means by which a small but very focused and determined adversary, like the Sigurimi at the time, can even the odds against a much larger enemy. It was a small, isolated episode for the CIA, certainly a blip on the radar compared with the hundreds of operations and thousands of agents it was running at the time around the world. But the failure to analyze properly and learn from that experience led the agency throughout the Cold War to emphasize spying against and defending from the Soviet Union alone as its primary task. In the late 1980s, as the Iron Curtain began to fall, secrets of intelligence activities from the Soviet satellites began coming to light, showing that the agency had ignored them at its own peril. The significant deception and playback operations that these smaller adversaries had executed successfully and over an extended period of time make the Albanian experience of the early 1950s look like child’s play.

  In 1987, Florentino Aspillaga Lombard was the chief of station for the Cuban Directorate of General Intelligence in Bratislava in what was then Communist Czechoslovakia. From the city on the banks of the Danube, he ran the network of agents spying on Austria and kept under surveillance over four thousands Cubans working in Czechoslovakia in lieu of payments for the economic aid it was giving Cuba at the time. On Saturday, June 7, Aspillaga put his girlfriend, one of the Cuban guest workers, in the trunk of his car, crossed the border into Austria and drove to the US embassy in Vienna fifty miles away, where he turned himself in to the CIA hands. Whisked away to a Virginia safehouse, Aspillaga revealed everything he knew about the Cuban intelligence operations against the United States. His most shocking revelation was that all the Cuban agents that the agency was handling at the time, about fifty of them, had been double agents run by Cuban intelligence in what is probably the longest-running deception operation known in the history of modern spycraft. Overnight, the US intelligence capabilities in Cuba had become nil and everything had to be rebuilt from scratch.5

  Equally damaging and embarrassing, albeit on a smaller scale, were the revelations of deception operations run by the East German Ministry of State Security, Ministerium für Staatssicherheit in German, or Stasi, as it became commonly known after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Markus Wolf, the head of Stasi’s foreign intelligence department and the mastermind of most of these operations, wrote contentedly in his memoir: “By the late 1980s, we were in the enviable position of knowing that not a single CIA agent had worked in East Germany without having been turned into a double agent or working for us from the start.” There had been only a handful of them, six or seven in total, but they had all been Stasi plants who had delivered handpicked information and disinformation to their CIA case officers over the years.6

  * * *

  In 1975, the Congressional investigations looking int
o government abuses after the Watergate scandal revealed that the agency had on several occasions considered assassinations of foreign leaders as part of its covert operations. The Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, known as the Church Committee after its chairman Frank Church, discovered that in the early days of the CIA, a “special operations” unit known as Program Branch 7 (PB/7) was assigned the responsibility “for assassinations, kidnapping, and such other functions as from time to time may be given it . . . by higher authority.”7

  E. Howard Hunt testified to the committee that in 1954, when he was chief of political and psychological warfare for Southeast Europe, he had suspected the presence of a double agent, a penetration by the Sigurimi, into the ranks of the Albanian Labor Services Company in Germany. Hunt recalled approaching the head of PB/7, Colonel Boris Pash, in “a search mission to determine whether the alleged capability of Colonel Pash in ‘wet affairs,’ . . . that is, liquidations, would have any relevance to our particular problem of the Albanian disappointments.”8

  Hunt’s inquiry was on a hypothetical basis, and he “didn’t get any satisfaction from Pash,” who was startled at the subject and told Hunt that such a move would have to be approved by a higher authority.9 Hunt understood the higher authority to be Wisner and did not pursue the matter further, since his suspicions had not yet focused on a particular agent and he didn’t have the name of the suspected individual. Other people within PB/7 at the time testified that “higher authority” included “State Department, Defense Department, National Security Council, the President of the United States.”10 All the witnesses who appeared before the Church Committee on this matter, including Hunt himself, testified that no actual assassination operation or planning was ever undertaken by PB/7 or its successor organization when all program branches were merged in the Directorate of Plans in late 1952.